PFINGSTEN: Replacement for Fallbrook mural nearing completion

By lunchtime on Tuesday, Melissa Ralston and Reid Schneider had bolted most of Fallbrook’s newest sculpture to a south-facing wall on East Hawthorne Street.

Capping more than a year of fundraising by local volunteers — as well as hundreds of hours of sheet metal work by Ralston, an Escondido artist — the piece was taking shape where one of the town’s oldest and most familiar murals was removed earlier this year.

Nearby, Sandi LeMasters stood in the street and watched as one of the large, heavy pieces of steel went into place on the wall.

“It looks better than I thought it was going to look,” said LeMasters, chair of the Art in Public Places committee that cares for a collection of 30 borrowed and donated works throughout Fallbrook. “The texture on the trunk just adds a dimension — it wasn’t there on her original design, and it just added a whole lot.”

That texture mimics the bark of an oak tree, and the rest of Ralston’s sculpture is a pleasant replacement for the painting of an oak that overlooked Hawthorne from the same wall for 14 years.

Originally painted by Debbie Sievers in 1998, that 15-foot-tall mural — titled “Treescape” — withstood 13 summers of brutal sunshine on a wall that receives precisely no shade, morning to afternoon.

After several retouchings and plenty of discussion, the public art committee decided “Treescape” had to come down.

Paint would never work on a wall that absorbed so much radiation throughout the year, towering almost 20 feet between the gun shop and the shoe store just off Main Avenue.

In September 2011, the committee sent out a call for proposals. They wanted concepts for less than $6,500 that maintained the tree theme — since the original piece was a tribute to Save Our Forest volunteers who planted thousands of trees around Fallbrook in the 1990s — and did not include paint.

“This is just a really hot wall,” LeMasters said this week. “And besides that, this is much more interesting than just another painting. We don’t have anything like this in town. It’s the first real piece of sculpture we have hanging on a wall anywhere.”

“Roots,” as the new piece is titled, will be officially unveiled on Jan. 5. The project wound up costing $8,300, and LeMasters told me that Ralston said she would probably charge $35,000 if she had to do it again.

From what I can tell, it is one of the hottest sidewalks in town. On Tuesday, a chilly December morning, Ralston was working in a tank top and sunglasses, and it felt at least 20 degrees cooler in the shade across the street than against the brick where the sculpture was going up.

LeMasters said the finish of the piece continued to be a sticking point even after Ralston was hired to sculpt “Roots.”

The committee wanted a rich, deep patina, but powder coating would have been far more durable. Ultimately, Ralston found a clear coat to apply over the patina that will prevent rust and can withstand graffiti being scrubbed away.